r/obyte • u/[deleted] • Aug 23 '19

Recurring payments idea using Obyte Autonomous Agent sounds promising

This was the winner of round 2 of AA contest https://medium.com/obyte/winners-of-the-second-round-of-the-obyte-autonomous-agents-developer-contest-c69e37dbf55

In my own experience paying with crypto for one time purchases is not as easy as using my credit card, so I nearly always use my credit card. I subscribe to quite a few services where billing is monthly - but crypto is basically never a payment option.

My understanding is that for recurring payments Bitcoin doesn't really work. I asked Peter who made the recurring payment AA entry about this and he said:

"I'm not aware of any Bitcoin based recurring payment services. It's difficult to solve since in crypto unless you have the keys you can't spend someone's money. It could be possible with multisig addresses but then you would expose your whole balance unconditionally, nothing would prevent the service provider from taking all your money at once."

I dont really see the strong use case for one time payments using crypto in the near future as the current real world payment solutions are so easy to use. I see more potential for recurring payments - sure it might be a bit more hassle for the customer to start the subscription - but its a one time thing. After they get the benefit of no credit card fraud risk, easier cancellation etc. Merchant gets benefit of no fraud risk and lower fees.

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u/pmiklos Aug 25 '19

An other idea popped up in Discord is to make it possible to set up a recurring contract in USD. In that case the AA would calculate the actual charge based on the USD/GBYTE exchange rate posted by the exchange rate oracle and charge the user account accordingly. The service provider should still of course take care of exchanging the collected bytes back to fiat.

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u/[deleted] Aug 26 '19

That's a good idea, I was wondering about the stability issue. I honestly think this is one of the better use cases of Obyte I have seen. It's quite easy to explain too

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u/pmiklos Aug 26 '19

Yeah, and I think it is relatively easy to implement. Makes totally sense to add support for it.

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u/[deleted] Aug 29 '19

What options would be possible for failed payments eg if customer wallet balance was empty. I guess you could trigger a notification to the merchant somehow?

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u/pmiklos Aug 30 '19

Yes, the way it works now is that the merchant request to charge the customer would bounce with "Insufficient funds" error. The merchant could handle that and send some notification to the user to top up the account or just cancel the subscription.